1. technology and computing
2. software
3. databases

Deep Aesthetic Learning
Estimating Photo Aesthetic Rating Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network
Enhao Gong
Electrical Engineering
Stanford University
[email protected]
1. Introduction
Abstract
1.1. Aesthetic Qualities
The aesthetic quality of a piece of art designs, such as a
photo, results in psychological responses in human beings.
There are multiple aspects that enable a high aesthetic quality of a photo.
Firstly, some technical and objective metrics are obvious related to photo qualities, such as exposure and sharpness. A photo can only be fully appreciated if it is well
exposed. Over exposed and under exposed photos are usually be treated as bad shots. Also, blurring often appears if
a photo is not well shot or there are motions that relatively
larger compared with the shutter time. There are a lot metrics quantify theses objective technical qualities.
Secondly, in contrast to objective qualities of a photo,
human beings are also tend to appreciate varies subjective
quality of a photo such as whether the composition is balanced and how the color distributed. It is hard to design a
metric to quantify these aesthetic qualities but various studies shows learning algorithms can be designed and tuned to
predict metrics related to composition (such as whether a
photo matches Rule-Of-Third or Golden Angle) and color
(which genre/style a photo/picture belongs to).
Last but not least, photos are also related to people’s
memory. Studies shows people are good at remember precise details in image. The most beautiful and meaningful
moments are distinctive when they are presented in photos.
Both extrinsic (related to human behavior and personal experiences) and intrinsic image features for making an image
memorable are studied.
Deep Learning has been widely applied in several computer vision applications such as item recognition and image retrieval. In addition to identifying what a image
contains, it is also a interesting problem to explore about
whether the image is appealing or the composition of the
items are highly rated aesthetically.
There are multiple studies using hand-designed or datadriven model to quantify the metrics regarding to photo
quality such as color distribution, composition, sharpness
etc. Aesthetic rating is such a complicated and unknown
function of human beings’ psychological responses to the
pixels that deep networks are potentially better tools to
achieve similar modeling and predictions. Existing large
aesthetic rating data-set also enable the training good deep
networks.
In this work, I developed a convolution neural network
dedicated for learning to model and predict photo ratings
from pixels. Novel data augmentation scheme and further
fine tuning regression from the learned features are the two
main parts of the contributions in this work. Results demonstrate better prediction performance compared with existing
solutions using either conventional engineered features or
deep networks. In addition, the trained network is able to
out-perform human beings in estimating the aesthetic rating
of images.
1.2. Challenges
The resulting performance are summarized and more details of network design and tuning are further discussed.
The trained networks are further quantified which also provides insights to the understanding of human being’s appreciation to art and beauty.
The largest challenge to predict photo qualities is that
most algorithms are utilizing low-level image features that
cannot sufficiently character the high-level perception of
aesthetics. Also, how to combine and integrate various
qualities (technical and emotional, subjective and objective,
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etc.) is still an open problem. Furthermore, in order to train
good model to estimate aesthetic rating of photos, enough
amount of detailed data is a necessity.
1.3. Deep Aesthetic Learning
In this work, we designed a dedicated convolutional deep
neural network [2] to tackle these problems.
The detailed goal is to estimate (with regression) the
average human rating on different photos.
The resulting performance are summarized and more details of network design and tuning are further discussed.
The trained networks are further quantified which also provides insights to the understanding of human being’s appreciation to art and beauty.
Figure 2. Example of dpChallenge website with lists of photos for
people to rate
2. Data Preparation
2.1. Datasets
In order to achieve good modeling of the complicated
aesthetic qualities, large dataset of photo aesthetic ratings
are of great importance. Here we are mainly use the AVA
dataset [4] that contains human ratings on over 250k photos.
Each data point is human’s response on a specific photo that
was posted on the DPChallenge website which were usually
rated by over 200 users. Each rate is from 0 to 10 so the final
averaged rate is a float value in the rage of (0,10). I used
230k data for training and 20k for regression. The mean
averaged rating is 5.3 ± 1.4.
Figure 3. Example of rating distribution of images on dp challenge
3. Methods
3.1. Non-CNN methods
Here I also implemented a baseline algorithm to evaluate
the performance.
3.1.1
I downloaded the dataset information describing the
photo IDs of all the photos and I developed python script
to crawl all the data from DPChallenge website. .
Features and Dimension Reduction
The are a lot of studies using engineered image features to
predict photo ratings. I also implemented similar algorithm
with basic feature sets of a photo include:
• Color Distribution: 3D HSL Histogram.
• Composition: Blurred Image and Salient Map
(Graphcut-based algorithm), GIST descriptor
• Sharpness: Gradient and Gradient entropy
• Details: SIFT BOW descriptor
The steps for prediction includes:
• Dimension Reduction with PCA
• Reduced feature based regression (Support-VectorRegression).
Figure 1. Ava dataset
The implementation of traditional algorithm provide
baselines for predicting photo ratings.
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3.2. CNN based methods
The main structure of the CNN is (Conv-ReLU-Pool) ×
N + Affine × M + Regression Layer. Different from the
models in examples, the architecture is modified based on
the new regression objective function, Euclidean Loss for
regression, L2 norm of the differences between groundtruth rating and predicted rating.
Previous studies by Lu et.al. [3] has developed complicated CNN to aesthetic ratings. The general idea is they
combine basic single column CNN on scaled global view of
image with another other CNNs integrating local and global
view and boosted with style information:
Figure 6. The prediction results from RAPID paper. They built
complicated regularized learning triple-column CNN model to
out-perform existing machine learning algorithm with engineered
features
Table 1. CNN structure and parameters
Layer
Data
Conv1
Conv2
Conv3
Conv4
Conv5
Conv6
FC5
FC6
FC7
• Local View CNN for local quality: a CNN trained with
randomly sampled local view of images,
• Style CNN for Regularized Learning: a CNN trained
with style data-sets
Parameters
256x256
6x5x5
32x3x3
64x3x3
64x3x3
64x3x3
64x3x3
FCx1000
FCx256
FCx1
Channels
6
32
64
64
64
64
64
ReLU
POOL
ReLU
ReLU
ReLU
ReLU
ReLU
ReLU
POOL
POOL
POOL
POOL
POOL
POOL
Figure 4. CNN structure from RAPID paper, integrating local and
global view and boosted with style information
Figure 7. CNN structure for this work. Integrating global and local
information with Data Augmentation. Boost the performance with
fine tuned regression.
Figure 5. The sampling and data augmentation scheme used for
RAPID paper which augment the data with local views and global
views
Here based on similar insight but with a different
scheme, I developed deep networks with simple single column CNN structure but incorporate further information using Data Augmentation way. Since CNN works the best
with local features, global information such as shapes and
compositions are not among CNN’s advantages. Thus, I
append features with global information to the additional
channels of images.
Instead of simple RGB 3 channels, the dataset fed into
the CNN is a 6 channel image-liked data:
New structures and schemes are developed for this work
shown in figure ?? and table 1 below .
3.3. Boost CNN with Data Augmentations
In this way, they incorporate features in unity from
global views and local views. In addition, they used the
style attributes of images to further improve aesthetic quality quantification with style categorizations related information.
• 3 channels of RGB
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Table 2. Results of Binary (2-class) Classification, CNN1:without
fine tuned regression, CNN2: with fine tuned regression
• 1 channel of color distribution
• 1 channel of details(edge) distribution
• 1 channel of composition (salient map)
Methods
2-Class Acc.
Based on the output table, we can see the results demonstrate the trained CNN with data augmentation but simple
structure can outperform conventional machine learning algorithms with engineered features.
AVA
67%
CNN
68.6%
RAPID
73.7%
CNN1
70.6%
CNN2
75.2%
Table 3. Results of Regression. The RMSE of the trained
model with fine tuned regression out-performance human behaviors which is quantified with the Standard Deviation of human being’s rating from 0 10
3.4. Further Boost CNN with Fine Tuning Regression
Methods
RMSE
In order to achieve better performance, we implemented
transfer learning and fine tuning. We get the CNN features
learned and developed a fined tuning regression model. The
regression model using here is Support Vector Regression
(SVR) with input from features from layer and the groundtruth for regression is the averaged ratings.
The SVR maps features from the original finite dimensional space into a much higher-dimensional space that is
able to fit what linear regression can never captures. So
intuitively, this SVR based Fine Tuning Regression further
boost CNN with much deeper network structures.
CNN2
0.71
Human Performance
1.43
5. Discussion and Future Plans
5.1. Implementation and Training
3.5. CNN implementation
The CNN is trained using Caffe [1] and python. I developed data preparation script in python (with image scaling,
sampling and augmentation with engineered features), the
Caffe CNN description script, result parsing script in python
(route the console output to text file and parse the output to
get the CNN loss as well as learned features). Further CNN
parameter tuning is based on the parsed results. Also the
Fine Tuning Regression is based on the output features.
4. Results
4.1. Goals and Metrics
Figure 8. The loss converges shown as training of CNN goes on
The most straightforward metrics to quantify the performance is the error of rating prediction. For DPChallenge,
the rating range is well defined in 0 10.
So there we explore two sets of accuracy metrics for performance estimation:
5.2. Error analysis
I plotted the prediction results, sorted and outputted
where the largest errors happened. Current CNN based
method still perform limitedly at some conditions:
• Accuracy for binary classification for two-classes
high-rated and low-rated (consistent with other studies
with the same dataset). It is a percentage value.
• over-estimation appears in some cases including images with dark background
• Root-Mean-Square-Error (RMSE) for regression
about how accurate the model can predict the rating
score. It is a value in unit of score.
• over-estimation appears in some cases including images with higher contrasts
• under-estimation appears in cases with simple structure, low contrasts but with specific content.
4.2. Results
Here shows the results of both classification and regression:
Some examples are shown in figure below 9.
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sonalized issue and subject dependent which is shown from
the large standard deviation of human’s rating on DPChallenge and AVA dataset. There should not be a globally optimal predictor working for everyone.
For future exploration, the CNN framework can be used
to study subject differences in photo rating, qualtify where
the inter-personal effect start to appear in the deep network and possibly provide personalized predictor or training framework.
Data, personalized data instead of the global data like
AVA dataset, is necessary to address the inter-personal differences of aesthetic perception. Also it can be used as a
data source for real-time on-line learning and updating. For
example, each personal should have different CNN weights
that is updated with its own data point.
One possible solution I may further pursue is to use
first-hand data on this problem from Polarr which is an online photo editing platform provide professional photo curation, editing and enhancement ( https://polarr.co)
shown in fig .
Figure 9. Example of errors of the CNN. Over-estimation appears
in some cases including images with dark background and higher
contrast and some under-estimation appears in cases with simple
structure, low contrasts but with specific content.
5.3. More data augmentations
Also it is possible to introduce more improvement by
fusing different quality metrics and augmenting data from
positive examples.
In this work we used the AVA datasets to estimate the
aesthetic ratings of photos directly from photos with positive and negative examples (highly and lowly rated photos).
In addition, further exploration with the learned model
can be applied on the datasets about all kinds of technical
qualites of photos from wikipedia database. There are example photos of optimal selection regarding to good composition, good exposure, good coloring as well as good
choice of blurring/sharpness etc. Different from the rated
photo from DP-Challenge, these photos are all positive examples.
Also there are labels of photos with different aethestic
styles, such HDR, etc. This labels can also be used to boost
the performance.
One possible solution is to use separate CNNs with regularized learning, similar to previous studies [3]. Also, we
can use these data to improve the training by augmenting
data from the available positive examples.
Figure 10. Personalized photo preference data is downloaded from
online photo curation platform Polarr.
6. Conclusion
• Here I designed and developed a dedicated deep convolutional neural network to predict photo’s aesthetic
ratings.
• Data Augmentation and further Fine Tuned Regression
greatly boosted the performance.
• The final results outperformed existing solutions in regression and classifications.
5.4. Personalized data
• To certain extent, the solution beat human performance.
In this work we demonstrate how CNN can be powerful to predict human’s perceptions on aesthetic quality. The
CNN model even though with a very simple structure but
can outperform traditional algorithms as well as human being’s performance by using specific data augmentation as
well as fine tuned regression to transfer the learned features.
However aesthetic preference can also be actually per-
• This work provided a way for automatic photo rating
and possibly for recommended editing
• To further improve the model, I plan to explore different loss functions, more data augmentations (multiple
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views) as well as the improvement of Transfer Learning and Regularized Learning
• Personalized data can make the model works for each
individual
References
[1] Y. Jia. Caffe: An open source convolutional architecture
for fast feature embedding. h ttp://caffe. berkeleyvision. org,
2013.
[2] A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, and G. E. Hinton. Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In Advances in neural information processing systems, pages 1097–
1105, 2012.
[3] X. Lu, Z. Lin, H. Jin, J. Yang, and J. Z. Wang. Rapid: Rating pictorial aesthetics using deep learning. In Proceedings
of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pages
457–466. ACM, 2014.
[4] N. Murray, L. Marchesotti, and F. Perronnin. Ava: A largescale database for aesthetic visual analysis. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2012 IEEE Conference
on, pages 2408–2415. IEEE, 2012.
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